Ask HN: The new “back to HTML” trend | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The new “back to HTML” trend

8 pointswarpech4 comments

This year, we can see a renaissance of (mostly) JavaScript-less websites and web apps, as an answer to the "Website obesity crisis" [1].

A recent prominent example is that "Hey.com UI is 100% HTML" [2]. Other compelling examples that I've seen are: "It’s perceivably faster to load 8.5 megabytes of HTML than it is to load a single tweet with a client-side React app." [3] or LOW←TECH MAGAZINE, a "solar-powered website" [4].

The numerous examples show that this is a trend now. I am looking for other compelling examples and explorations of this trend.

Do you think it is an important trend to copy, or mostly irrelevant gimmick (similar to code golf excercises)?

[1] https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23536517 [3] https://twitter.com/zachleat/status/1169998370041208832 [4] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html

UK government websites and associated services have been designed to work without JavaScript (https://www.gov.uk/).

They have blogged about this a few times:

Building a resilient frontend using progressive enhancement (Dec 2019)

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/technology/using-progressi...

Here is a much earlier (2013) blog article but still relevant

How many people are missing out on JavaScript enhancement? (Oct 2013)

https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2013/10/21/how-many-people-are-missi...

It’s tough to say. Many teams are going on a Graphql adventure, and I’m not sure how we’re going to avoid things like React when Apollo is being seen as the default client framework.

These things are not set in motion based out of need from the average developer, we have to examine the trends in conference talks to pinpoint who is controlling the zeitgeist here.

The JavaScript Illuminati is real.

While having a GraphQL API, it is totally doable to render a React app on an edge node and send SSR web pages to the client. But such setup rarely seems to be a goal for businesses.

Wow.. any resources for this type of architecture?

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